Stylos is the blog of Jeff Riddle, a Reformed Baptist Pastor in North Garden, Virginia. The title "Stylos" is the Greek word for pillar. In 1 Timothy 3:15 Paul urges his readers to consider "how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar (stylos) and ground of the truth."

Monday, July 22, 2013

The hermeneutical justification for the wider implications of the fifth commandment

Note: In our Sunday afternoon services at CRBC we are continuing to work our way through Spurgeon's revised version of the Baptist Catechism. I have devoted the last three messages in the series to the catechism's instruction on the wider implications of the fifth commandment (first in the so-called "second table" of the law and, therefore, first in treating man's relation to his fellow man) and have at least one (and possibly two) more messages to go before moving on to the sixth commandment. The Fathers who prepared the catechism note that the applications flowing from the underlying principles of the fifth commandment go beyond merely the duty of children to honor parents but requires, "the
preserving the honour, and performing the duties belonging to every one in
their several places and relations, as superiors, inferiors, or equals." As Thomas Vincent points out in his study of the Shorter Catechism, this commandment addresses proper relations between children and parents, wives and husbands, servants and masters, citizens and magistrates, churches and ministers, etc. Here are some notes I shared in the second message in the series offering a brief hermeneutical justification for these wider applications.

Before going
forward I want first to address a question of hermeneutics or the proper
interpretation and application of Scripture.
Some of us were discussing the approach of our Puritan and Particular
Baptist fathers reflected in this catechism in their interpretation and
expansion of this commandment in particular.
Did they go beyond what is written to say that the fifth commandment
addresses not only children honoring parents but also other human relationships?

I want to
argue that this approach is appropriate for the following two Biblical reasons:

First: It follows the example of how Jesus
interpreted the Ten Commandments in the Sermon on the Mount (see the so-called antitheses of Matthew 5:21, 28 where Jesus says that the prohibition against murder also includes in principle a prohibition against unjust anger and the prohibition against adultery also includes a prohibition against lust).

Second: It follows the example of how Paul applied the fifth commandment in the household code of Ephesians 6:1-4 [cf. Colossians
3:20-21]. Note especially how Paul's citation of the fifth commandment in Ephesians 6:2-3 appears literally at the very conceptual center of the Ephesian household code:

A. Wives and husbands (Eph 5:22-33)

B. Children (6:1)

C. Citation of the fifth commandment (6:2-3)

B' Fathers (6:4)

A' Servants and masters (6:5-9)

And for the
following logical reason:

If the Ten
Commandments are the summation of the moral law of God, then we should be able
to trace the root of any moral law to at least one of the Ten Commandments. One cannot say, for example, the Bible does
not forbid bank robbery explicitly, so bank robbery must be OK. No, the prohibition against bank robbery is
included in the eighth commandment, Thou shalt not steal.

There is, of
course, a caution here. The applications
we draw from the principles underlying the Ten Commandments must be logically
and Biblically consistent.